Eccentric Flower:199902/world report
From Eccentric Flower
«February 1999 «Eccentric Flower
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twenty february world report Here is my list of things I want to do this weekend. - Write more material for the impudence.com renovation. The problem is that it is 5:30 in the evening on Saturday and I have done none of these, save the latter. I spent last night playing a marathon session of the game I've been waiting for eagerly for three years, until Nonelvis suggested that my brain was leaking from my ears and that I should stop. She was right. It's a very information-dense game. Today I spent two hours reading three issues of The Economist in a single go. It amuses me that it takes me forty-five minutes to an hour to read a detective novel, but [Oops. Wait. "Circles" is playing.] Where was I? Oh, you can finish that sentence for yourself. The danger of reading that much Economist at once is that it convinces you the world is going to hell. - - - With the articles that are positive, you suspect their pro-market stance and thereby discount their optimism. They are arguing, for example, that the reaction in Britain against genetically-altered foods is unwarranted hysteria, which it might be, but no one ever stops to ask if the alterations were needful. They insist that hormone-fed beef is harmless to humans - well, perhaps, but with way too much beef-eating anyway, and cattle production already so high as to cause severe ecological repercussions in some parts of the country, do we really need something that boosts beef production artificially? Meanwhile Consumer Reports is publishing studies on the unacceptably high amounts of pesticide residue found on American fruits and and vegetables. The usual outcry from the industry already shows signs of beginning ... how dare CR tell the truth? The magazine also notes that organically-grown food is more popular than ever in this country. CR knows why. Monsanto honestly hasn't a clue. - - - As suspicious as their positive articles are, their negative ones are worse. The split in Europe is growing more pronounced. There was always a sharp divide between the haves and the have-nots; now, with some countries almost penniless, and their inhabitants trying to kill each other and destroy what little is left, organized crime in the poor countries has a new moneymaker - trafficking in humans. Smuggling humans from poor countries into properous ones is now big business, especially with the Schengen rules which now make a great deal of rich Europe in effect borderless. America knows about the immigration problem. Everyone wants to come to the prosperous place, but if the prosperous place is flooded, its popularity will become its ruin. On the other hand, if you clamp down on immigration, you begin to look like the villain. You can't blame people for wanting to go where the prosperity is. There is no way to win. Russia is becoming a desert; the few people who have held onto any money there are frantically selling off anything left of value on the black market. Including missiles. The threat of nuclear war is now no longer that a large, developed country will stockpile them; the threat is instead that of a lone, rogue country. North Korea keeps getting better at building them; they don't actually want to use them, I don't think, but the cult that's running the country wants to use them to extort money to support its lifestyle. Meanwhile most of North Korea is starving, and the South Koreans are reluctant to let them in, for reasons given above. The U.S. is thinking of putting new anti-missile protections in play to keep China and North Korea at bay. Unfortunately this is in defiance of their policy with Russia which requires that both nations be able to destroy each other at all times, so they're trying to come up with a shield that would stop a few rogue missiles while still allowing Russia to kill us. I am not making this up. Never mind that Russia's missiles are rusting apart and there is barely a government to fire them. - - - Iraq, King Hussein's death, Afghanistan in the hands of the Taliban, Ireland about to re-erupt, no Kosovo solution in sight, the Euro off to a shaky start, world deflation lurking ahead, corporations taking everything they can get and damn the consequences ... I could go on for days. It makes me realize why so many Americans are ignorant of world events. With news like this, hiding one's head in the sand begins to look more attractive than it rightfully should. Someone send me some good news.
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